Tuesday, 17 February 2015

Paul Chadwick: Lacking A 25-Year Grand Plan

BACK ISSUE MAGAZINE:(from an article by Alex Boney in Back Issue #75, TwoMorrows Publications, September 2014)

...The Human Dilemma
[2004-2005] is the last Concrete miniseries
Chadwick has produced to date. Concrete’s story is
not necessarily over, though. There are still a number
of unanswered questions (Where did those aliens
come from, anyway? What did they want? Where have
they gone?) and a number of new storytelling avenues
to pursue (Papa Concrete!), but for now there is no
grand plan in place to guide the story’s continuation.
As Chadwick points out, “It was a mistake not to map
out a grand plan. In this regard, Dave Sim and Jeff
Smith (and Brian Vaughan, in
Y: The Last Man) really
did it right. My problem was that when I started, I really
thought I was going to do comics for just five years,
and then move on to my real career in illustration.
It was what I trained for. Most of my friends were
illustrators. It seemed a more prestigious profession.
I like to paint. But I wanted to first get this Concrete
idea out of my system.

“It’s pretty ironic, because illustration has since
almost vanished as a career, thanks to Photoshop.
Payment rates have plummeted. What percentage of
books or ads have painted illustrations these days?
It’s tiny. Everything is manipulated photos now. People
with imaginative drawing and painting skills today go
into game design, and work mostly digitally, to boot.
Or they go into comics.

“The comics field, which seemed to be dying when
I was a teenager, has an almost absurdly high cultural
profile at the moment - even if it’s troubled by the
tumult afflicting all publishing industries, as we
transitioned from paper objects to digital files. You can
now major in college in sequential friggin’ art. It was
unthinkable when I was young. And the biggest
movies all have comics roots, though I wonder how
much longer that will last. Long enough for the
Concrete movie to finally get made, I hope.

“Anyway, if I were to do it over, I’d definitely have
a 25-year plan as Dave Sim did. Storytelling is moving
in that direction, now that digital media has made
everything available at all times. We can follow
The
Sopranos
for nearly a decade, invest in the fates of a
vast cast of characters - or, if we get in late, catch up
on what has gone before at any time. I think this
cultural moment was anticipated by the Marvel
crossover continuity, imperfect as it was. It’s certainly
paying off in its second life onscreen.

“I really wish I’d decided early on to make
Concrete
my life’s work and drawn up a plan. Even if I’d made
the barest outline, e.g., ‘Year 7 - Concrete goes to Asia,’
I could have created something much more significant.
“The other problem I had is that I’m slow. I write
and ink slowly, though I’m a pretty fast penciler. Still,
I can’t manage six issues a year, working solo. I tried
working with an assistant at one point and found
it little help. I guess not everybody’s a Gerhard. My
wife’s health problems started in the early 2000s, too,
and our medical adventures have been sort of a part-time job ever since.”

Since the publication of
The Human Dilemma,
Chadwick has written three more Concrete stories for
Dark Horse. When
Dark Horse Presents
relaunched in
2011, Chadwick provided short stories for the book’s
first three issues. It’s a testament to the enduring creative
quality of Chadwick’s work that, despite an irregular
publication schedule stretched out over 25 years, Dark
Horse turned to Concrete to anchor a relaunch of the
company’s flagship title.

Concrete is not an ordinary story. It’s a drama
balanced with elements of science fiction and frequent
moments of humor. It’s a story that invites the use of
adjectives not often associated with comic books
featuring a superpowered protagonist: thoughtful,
contemplative, delicate, philosophical, deliberate,
restrained, meditative, nuanced, subtle... and the
list goes on. All of these descriptions are appropriate,
but it’s a book that’s not confined to a singular tone
or point of view. And after 25 years of publication,
no matter where the story goes, the difficulty to
characterize
Concrete
remains one of the book’s
great strengths...

Concrete jockeys for position with Cerebus for my favorite comic. They have many, many similarities, beyond the gray non-human at the center. Both Sim and Chadwick use their comic as a platform to explore their philosophical concerns in depth, both are master draughtsmen, both have a real gift for black and white imagery, etc.

I think of Concrete as being the liberal, secular-humanist version of Cerebus.

Thanks for the kind words, all. I am still plugging away, just finishing a non-Concrete graphic novel for Dark Horse, and beginning the next Concrete series.

What I didn't quite emphasize enough is the way a Sim-like plan guards one against distractability. In the first flush of Concrete's success I was, as the saying goes, "invited to every party in town." And I did a bunch of covers and stories that didn't amount to much, when I could've been adding wings to my own little castle.

Also, my earlier contacts in the movies, where I'd been a storyboard artist, amounted to a siren song (somehow I turned down Tim Burton's offer to storyboard his first Batman [!], but not the chance to be production designer of After Midnight, which took me away from Concrete for a year at its height of success).

When you're young you think you have all the time you'll need. But the years fly by, and success must be built upon or it dims as people move on to the next thing.

Not that I'm done, by any means, but I regret failing to, paraphrasing Wilde, burning with a hard, gemlike flame.

"I AM NOT DAVE SIM"

This is an UNOFFICIAL fan-site. Although Dave Sim posts a Weekly Update here every Friday and other exclusive articles, Dave Sim and Gerhard have no control over the other content of this site ~ Tim W.